301 Redirect

A 301 redirect is an HTTP status code that indicates that a page or resource has been permanantly moved to another location. When a webpage or resource that has a 301 redirect set up is requested (such as a user loading a page in a browser, or a search engine crawler loading a URL) the requestor is automatically redirected to the specified URL.

301 redirects should be used to maintain a good user experience (and search enginge rankings!) when things change on a website. If a page or resource is removed or moved to a new location, using a 301 redirect will ensure that any attempts to access that page or resource at its old location will still end up getting to the correct end result (like a user that has bookmarked a page, or a search engine that has indexed a URL).

Here are a few examples of when a 301 redirect should be used:

• When there is a change in the genral URL structure of a website (e.g. during a website redesign, or doing something like moving all blog posts underneath the base URL '/blog/')
• When removing an existing page or resource
• When consolidating multiple web pages into a single page